Tips when hiring marketing consultants.

• When someone comes into your office with endless questions, asks about your cost, profits and margins, snoops round your premises, bothers your staff, starts taking apart your product, noses at your ordertaker's screen then proceeds to insult you, asking why you should get his business and not your rival and asks why you think you'll be here in five years to service your guarantee, then starts arguing and asking why you want a brochure and says he'll think about it when asked a question.... grab him or her.....
  
  
  
  By the hand and hire them!
  
  There are a lot of chaps who will agree with what you say to them and do exactly what you want. They are offering a marketing service and will take your money.
  
  The irritating, hard work guy is offering a consultancy, they will delve, discover and bring revelations which will earn and save you serious money.
  
  
• A mistake is insisting on experience in your field.
  
  The idea is to get a bright outsider to give you a different perspective on your business.
  
  To see the wood for the trees.
  
  
• Get in a specialist in your field and more than likely you'll get re runs of what has gone before.
  
  
• Worse, the specialist may be working with your main rival The specialist will also learn from you and transfer some of this to other firms- competitors in your specialist field.
  
  Go for a good generalist, who working in lots of fields won't get stale.
  
  
• Ask your prospective helper about their marketing mistakes and disasters and whether they have marketed products themselves.. This will show whether they have real knowledge and empathy or are just doling out theory. Another point is if you have not had mistakes, you haven't learnt.